Health

My beloved wife Sandy and I shared an enthusiasm and deep interest in all facets of what makes a person truly, vibrantly healthy.  This page will be the focus on this web site of my interest and learning through all of the 40+ years I shared this interst with her, and additionally, a "whole new level" of understanding gained through experience taking care of her during the 3 years since she first became ill. 

I decided to update my web site, adding this page because I hoped it would be more helpful to others than my oral explanations, emails that were either too long or too short, and were otherwise too chaotic to be of much use. 

Quick start links - these are videos and other information sources that I regularly recommend to others who are becoming interested in improving their state of health, and/or healing themselves from a potentially terminal illness:

• Stanford University Twins Experiment - Netflix Video series - "You Are What You Eat: A Twins Experiment."  This video describes a remarkable experiment with 61 pairs of identical twins (identical twins have exactly the same genetic structure).  Over an 8 week period; one twin ate the "regular diet" typical of most people, meat, processed foods, etc., while the other ate the mostly vegan diet that was for this experiment.  A wide variety of physical measurements, blood work, etc., were made throughout the experiment.  After only 8 weeks, all of the twins, not just some, but all, demonstrated a major improvement in their measurable health.

• Effect of the 5 health-giving factors listed further below.  Netflix Video Series - "Life to 100:  Secrets of the Blue Zones.  This heart-warming, sometimes funny, but incredibly insightful series documents actual people who are strong and active, leading fully active lives well into their late 90's and over 100, without chronic illness or struggle in their lives.  It shows, in ways anyone can grasp, how our lifestyle is causing us to age much earlier than we would otherwise, and to essentially lose decades of quality lifespan. 

There are 5 areas in our lives which interact to affect our overall, "net total" health and quality lifespan:

• Diet - what we eat, the building blocks we give, or don't give to our bodies to replace the always-turning-over cell populations in our various tissues and organs as well as healing from injuries or illness.  A highly nutritious diet provides basic building blocks for this activity, while a low-nutrition diet forces our body, mostly our liver, to manufacturing the incredible array of molecules this activity requries for us to be sustained.  On the Harvert Medical School Health Publishing web site is this article which summarizes multiple studies on this question, HERE.

The energy and physical resources on our liver and elsewhere manufacturing these moldecules is a major work load, and in the process substantially reduces the energy and resources our bodies have to fight disease, especially "life-style" diseases resulting from long-standing, chronic inflammation, i.e., arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and most cancers. 

• Sleep - how we sleep, length, quality, how much deep and REM (dream) sleep we get, has a profound effect on how our memory works.  Recent research proves conclusively that the purpose of sleep is not so we can rest from physical activity, but so our brain can reset it self for the next day, in particular our memory.  Poor quality or insufficient sleep, such as what results from having an alcoholic drink shortly before bed, or when taking many prescription sleep drugs, such as Ambien, or from other causes, causes our memories to not work well because our sleep consists of being unconscious, but not having the normal deep / REM sleep cycles.  The result is a major factor later in life for the development of Alzheimers, both the actual disease from amyloid plaque build up, and other causes of dementia.  Matt Walker's book, "Why We Sleep" is a good source on recent research that explains and confirms these connections.  On Amazon.

• Exercise - all forms of exercise increase circulation in the body.  Certain types of exercise have different effects on longevity, and what we are capable of when older, and how we age.  In particular, recent research confirms that serious strength training, i.e., "weight lifting," is the single most effective form of exercise that postpones physical aging, as a study on the NIH site explains.

• Emotional - How we process experiences, our positive / negative attitudes, etc., all have a profound effect on our health.  Learning how to manage this so we have a health-promoting emotional life is a challenge, more for some people than others, and profoundly effects the quality, and length of our life.  For example, a study at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that people who had the highest (i.e., most positive) attitude towards aging were 43% less likely to die from any cause over the 4 year period of the study.

• Spiritual - whether we "believe in God" or not (I was an atheist for much of my life, and a more generally "spiritual" person until 2007 when I found my way to Christ), there are countless studies and experiments which validate the scientific truth that one's spirtual life has a profound effect on the quality and legnth of one's life.  A paper on the National Institutes for Health web site, for example, says, "numerous epidemiological studies showing that higher levels of spirituality/religiosity are associated with lower risk of mortality, even after adjusting for relevant confounders."

Key - none of these 5 areas are included in standard medical training, not included as explicit "treatments" for the conditions that result from their lack or poor state of health in our lives.  So we are "on our own" for these.  How medical doctors are educated, trained, and the medical insurance system is the result of an over 100 year process that originated when the major health challenge in life was infectious diseases. 

The model for this type of medical care is called "allopathic" - the practice of using substances or procedures foreign to the body, ie., not a natural process within the body, to cure a disease or condition.  Little or nothing was known about "natural healing" in the 1920's when medical schools as we would now recognize them, were started.  The medical industry, and medical insurance industries resulted from this paradigm and the institutions they built to perform this mission, which they have done quite successfully.  Infectious diseases have been largely vanquished as a serious cause of mortality, while various chronic illnesses resulting from poor health have become the leading causes of death.

Now, in 2024, we now have mountains of solidly done scientific information that confirms the truth of what these two videos are saying, along with thousands of other sources, that our body can and normally will avoid illness in the first place, and if contracted, can frequently heal itself given the proper support - i.e., these 5 factors.  But do not expect to have your doctor tell you about these things.  He/she is simply not trained on them, nor do the institutions (including medical insurance) they have to practic within support them in any way.  They will tell you that these things are "ancedotal" i.e.., not scientific. 

Square One Program - on Amazon, you can find a book named "Chris Beat Cancer."  The author is Chris Wark, a now 40+ year old man who contracted colon cancer in his mid-twenties.  Chris had surgery, but because chemo would have left him sterile, he chose to try and heal himself via natural methods.  He was successful, and so have hundreds of people who have used the program he developed, called "Square One" to health themselves from cancer.

My wife Sandy followed this program after completing radiation and chemo treatments for her glioblastoma, grade 4 brain tumor, diagnosed in October 2020.  The doctors said they could not make the tumor go away, but could slow it, which the treatment did.  I think the chemo and radiation did damage or weaken the tumor, but it was only a little smaller after the treatment.  So she started on this program at that point, and 6 months later, it was gone.  Nine months afterwards, the oncologist said "its gone, and been gone for some time: how did you do this?"  It is possible, of course, that the damage the chemo did was the primary cause of the tumor disappearance, but the doctor did not express this thought at all.

So Sandy had about 16+ months of pretty good life that she would not have had.  A second, new pair of tumors elsewhere in her brain that moved very quickly, and were hard to identify on an MRI, took her life 90 days after diagnosis.  The Square One program was a lot of work (especially the 48 oz / day of a juice formula) to stay on, and unfortuantely we had fallen away from it after the good news in August 2022.  I continue the diet myself (but not the juice) because of its unequivocal benefit in my blood lab work and overall health and what I saw it do for her.

Here's a link to Chris Wark and the Square One program HERE.

I plan to add more to this page going forward.  This update is as of September 24, 2024.